Introduction to User Experience Principles and Processes (Bonus Material)

Basic Method of UX Research

Observe

Inspect

Ask

Focus Group

Diary Studies

Interview & Survey

Experience Sampling

Conversations with stakeholder to understand aspects of their experience

Questions distributed to lots of people to elicit attitudes, behaviours and characteristics

Usage Analytics

Video Analysis

User Testing

Social Media Mining

Observe When...

Walkthrough

Comparative Analysis

Guideline-based

Combo: Watch & Ask

Contextual Interviews

Artifact based methods

User's Testing

Ash when...

Observation infeasible (infrequent, long and private etc)

Values and motivation are the keys (not easy to find out why people are doing certain things)

(Surveys) Large number and high certainty are needed eg. statiscal modelling

Ethnographic Observations

Process and communication are important (how communication plays a part)

(Analytics) Large numbers amd high certainty are needed

Self-report will miss information (eg. memory, tacit knowledge) things that will not be able to tell in survey

Inspect when...

You have a product to inspect eg. prototype - guideline based inspection and walkthrough

When interacting with users is too expensive and cumbersome

Iterative Design

Design

Build

Access

Steps

  1. Low-fidelity prototype (after a few rounds)
  1. Heuristic evaluation ; guideline-based inspection (after a few rounds)
  1. Comparative Analysis (after the 1st round)
  1. Hi-fidelity user testing (put the product infront of user and hear their feedback)
  1. Observations
  1. Analytics; set up analytics to track and see how people are actually using the product, so that we can use the information to improve our product in the next cycle
  1. Interviews

Watching people engage in activities to understand how they go about them

Hanging around the environment, to know how user go about them

Watching people perform scripted tasks to see if system supports them

Watching people interacting with prototype

Employ web/mobile analytics to understand the pattern of usage

comparing a system design against known best practices to find possible flaws

stepping through the interaction sequence from the "user view" to find probable breakdown

systematically comparing a design with similar design to identify strength and weaknesses

Task observation is typically accompanied by interviews (ask what works and why?)

Ask question while observing "natural" activities take place (Ask them why they are doing what they do)